"If you want me to test your app(lication), pay me."
- so-called "power user"
What many of today's software authors want/expect is free testing.
"To me, this seems to not just be admitting defeat, it's ensuring defeat right from the start."
While I do not use any of the example programs the mentioned, it seems like these environmental variables would be appropriate if the user wants to toggle between tracking and no tracking. However, for users who would never want to enable tracking, "no tracking" should be a compile-time option. It would not suprise me if that is not even possible with these programs. How is the user supposed to verify that "Do Not Track" is being honoured.
> What many of today's software authors want/expect is free testing.
Many of apps and tools are open-source and free. While I assume everyone wants to provide best experience, it's hard for me to justify being angry for bugs and problems in tools that I got for free, not bought them.
Secondly, the industry realized that going fast, releasing often, measuring results, and improving over time is a winning strategy. No matter how often we as users will complain that "they changed something again", we still want to get things fast. Deploying new version once per year is not something we would really like in most cases.
And fast development cycle inevitable comes with bugs, but they can be fixed quickly, not in the next year. Because even if you spend 2 months on testing your app, it will still contain bugs that will surface after the first real user touches the app.
What many of today's software authors want/expect is free testing.
"To me, this seems to not just be admitting defeat, it's ensuring defeat right from the start."
While I do not use any of the example programs the mentioned, it seems like these environmental variables would be appropriate if the user wants to toggle between tracking and no tracking. However, for users who would never want to enable tracking, "no tracking" should be a compile-time option. It would not suprise me if that is not even possible with these programs. How is the user supposed to verify that "Do Not Track" is being honoured.